This country, the largest of islands or the smallest of continents as we may choose to designate it, the most remote of all the great divisions from the center of the land hemisphere, has been the last to feel the pulses of civilization. There, therefore, is to-day the most rapid, the most amazing advancement to be witnessed on the earth; it has crowded centuries into decades, and with its shores adorned even now, in its youth, with states and cities, it cannot longer be called a land left behind in the world’s advance. It has inherited all that was finished in the knowledge and culture of the continental world; what the people of that world have toiled for years to win, becomes at once the birthright of the Australians. It is only an instance of the truth of Humboldt’s remark, that the more full the world is of ideas, the more rapid is its progress—a remark which throws the strongest light upon the connection of geography with history. The Historical Element in Geographical Science. While so many a spot in the great continental land-mass was once the home of a high culture, and from being a cradle of arts and sciences has become a deserted waste, the civil and political condition of many people in the remote districts on the oceanic side of the globe has advanced with unprecedented rapidity. The course of development has been very different from what it was formerly. Distances, natural influences, natural productions even, yield always to the victorious march of man, and disappear before his tread; or, in other words, the human race is more and more freed from the forces of nature; man is more and more disenthralled from the dominion of the earth which he inhabits. The history of specific districts and of entire continents confirms this. The first inhabitant of the sandy valley of the Nile was a dweller in a waste, as the nomadic Arab is to-day. But the later and more cultivated Egyptians transformed that waste, through the agency of irrigation and canals, into the most fruitful garden of the world. They not only rose themselves, but raised their own country, hitherto so sterile, into a place of the first importance, and did it by the simplest of means,—the bringing the water and the land into more intimate relations. Through neglect and the tyranny of successive kings, the fruitful valley sank again into its waste condition. The district around Thebes became a desert, the fruitful Mareotis a swamp; similar phenomena occurred in many parts of Europe and Asia.